LOGINISLAMy feet moved. That was the worst part. They moved and I didn’t tell them to. The cave floor was wet stone, slick with something that had never seen sunlight, and my toes curled against it for balance without asking me. My arms hung at my sides. Loose. Wrong. Like they belonged to someone else and I was just borrowing them. Darius walked ahead of me. His back was to me. His right arm was bent wrong, the bone pressing against skin, but he didn’t cradle it. He didn’t limp. He wouldn’t give me that. Each step had to be agony. He didn’t show it. The cave breathed. It wasn’t wind. Wind was outside. This was deeper. It came from the walls, from the black water that ran in thin streams along the floor and vanished into cracks. It smelled like iron and old salt and something else. Something that had been waiting. “Keep up,” Darius said. He didn’t turn around. My legs obeyed. I was scared not scared of the dark one bit. I was only scared of me, and how quiet I was inside my own hea
DARIUSThe water didn’t touch us. It should have. The ocean was there, black and endless, but every time the wolf’s paws came down, the surface went solid. Not ice. Not stone. Something older. The kind of law that existed before oceans learned how to drown things. She ran and the sea bent for her, and I rode on her shoulder with one hand fisted in fur that burned my palm. I was done for. An hour ago, I was on my back in a crater, my ribs caved in, my arm bent backwards, Lucian’s fist turning my face to pulp. I could still taste my own blood. Could still feel where my teeth were missing. My left eye was swollen shut. My lungs were wet. Every breath was a gamble. I should have been dead. Now I was here. On the back of a god. The red blood moon was six days away. Six days to hide. Six days to heal. Six days until I could tear the omega blood out of her and finally finish what Elara never started. The wolf ran for hours. Across water. Over islands that weren’t on any map. Through
LUCIANThe first thing I felt was the wall. Not stone. Not air. Force. It hit me in the chest and took my breath with it. One second I had Isla in my arms, her face buried in my neck, her tears hot on my skin. The next I was airborne. I hit the crater wall twenty feet up. My shoulder took it first. Something tore. I heard it. A wet, ripping sound that belonged to meat, not to me. I slid down, rock scraping my back raw, and hit the ground on my knees. “Isla!” I shouted. Or tried to. My throat was full of dust and blood and her name came out broken. She was standing. No. It wasn’t her. The wolf in the center of the crater was twelve feet tall, maybe thirteen. Fur like hammered silver. Eyes that weren’t eyes. They were white fire. The mark I’d put on her shoulder was gone. Burned away like it had never been. She threw her head back and howled. The sound wasn’t sound. It was a command. The ocean answered it. The whole island shuddered. Darius moved. He shouldn’t have been able to
DARIUSThe rock under my back was cold. That was the first thing I registered. Not the pain. The cold. It seeped through my skin and told me I was still alive. Unfortunate. My left side was caved in. I could feel my ribs grinding when I breathed. My right arm was bent backwards at the elbow. My face was a ruin. I couldn’t see out of my left eye. Blood was in my mouth, in my throat, in my lungs. Every cough brought more. I was defeated. The word sat in my chest heavier than the broken bones. Centuries of planning. Of waiting. Of moving pieces across a board that spanned continents. All of it, gone. Because four alpha boys who should have been dead already decided to be heroes. Because Elara’s little reincarnation had more teeth than I gave her credit for. Fear had found me when the guards came running. Real fear. The kind I hadn’t felt since I was nineteen and my brother put a blade in the only woman I’d ever respected. It crawled up my spine when I saw Lucian’s boat cutting acro
ISLAThe dust that swept around hadn’t settled. It hung in the air like a curtain, thick with rock and salt and the smell of burnt lightning. The cove wasn’t a cove anymore. It was a wound in the island, a crater that went down twenty feet, and the black water was rushing in to fill it, slow and heavy like it was afraid to touch what had happened here. Elias-and-Jace stood in the middle of it. The fused wolf was coming apart. Not violently. Not with a snap. With an exhale. Light peeled off them in strips, fur receding, bone shrinking, the twelve feet of storm breaking into two men who hit their knees hard on the shattered stone. Elias first. His back arched. He coughed and blood hit the ground. His shoulder was torn open, muscle and bone and something white that shouldn’t be seen. He didn’t make a sound. Jace second. He landed on his hands, head down, his side a mess of red and black. The lightning was gone from his skin but the air around him still hummed. He was breathing like h
ISLAThe air was broken. It wasn’t just the sound. It was the air itself. Every molecule between the cove and the sky had been torn and stitched back wrong. It tasted like copper and burnt ozone and it scraped my throat when I breathed. I was on my knees in the bottom of the boat. I didn’t remember falling. The black thing in my veins had decided standing wasn’t allowed. My hands were braced on the metal floor. My knuckles were white. Above me, the night wasn’t night anymore. Elias-and-Jace stood in the crater their fight had made. Twelve feet of fused Alpha, fur crackling with lightning that didn’t come from the sky. It came from them. From the ground up. From the core of the island. It poured out of their paws and ran up their legs and gathered in their chest like a second heart. Their eyes—Jace’s green, Elias’s brown—were gone. There was only white. Only storm. Darius was across from them. His white fur was matted with blood and light. He wasn’t healing as fast now. The cuts
ISLAI felt a pang of disappointment and hurt when Lucian pushed me away after accepting our wolf bond. But as I saw Elias and Jace approaching, I realized why he did that. Maybe he didn't want anyone to know that I was his mate now.Fear still gripped me as I saw Elias's face, his intense gaze and
I looked up at Lucian, confusion etched on my face. "Who is Elara?" I asked.Lucian's expression changed, and he realized whom he had just called me. "I'm sorry, I meant to say Isla," he said, trying to cover.But I shook my head. "No, I want to know who Elara is. Because my wolf name is Elara," I
LUCIANI stood frozen, my mind reeling from Isla's words. She couldn't be serious. She was saying that she was my mate, that she was a wolf, and that her wolf's name was Elara. It was impossible. I should have known she was my mate. Oh wait, I knew but, We had tested her with the sphere, and it ha
LUCIAN "I love you, Isla," I whispered, my voice filled with emotion. "No, It’s Elara now," she replied, her voice firm. I looked at her in shock, wondering what she meant. "What do you mean?" I asked, my mind racing with questions. She smiled, her eyes shining with tears. "After the kiss, I







